Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

François Truffaut | Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim)

As
those many film-goers and readers who have seen François Truffaut’s 1962
picture or have read the earlier novel by Henri-Pierre Roché well know, Jules and Jim is the tale of the
triangular interrelationships between two men, Jules (Oscar Werner) and Jim
(Henri Serre), and a woman Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) presented over a number of
years. The close friendship and male bonding between Jules and Jim is described
as similar to the inextricable pairing of Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza, while, quite obviously, calling up images of Flaubert’s Bouvard
and Pécuchet—who pondered the failures of 19th century culture—and,
remind one of the cinema comics, Laurel and Hardy, with Jim playing the tall
and lean Stan Laurel, and Werner playing the shorter, rounder-faced and
loveable—but in this case still quite handsome Oliver Hardy. Although their
interactions are obviously heterosexual, there are intimations, through their
athletic encounters in the gymnasium, where they share showers and massages of,
at least, a homoerotic attraction. At one point in the film, they refer to
their own relationship as “queer.”

Early in the film they share a number of
women, but it is, finally, Catherine, who most attracts them, for her beauty
and, more importantly, her impetuous behavior. For the two slightly pedantic “fools,”
Catherine, a proto-feminist figure, is irresistible in her ability to bring out
the insignificance (and comic silliness) of their lives, and they soon
determine to join her in a vacation chateau, where they seem content to share
her equally. She, in turn, entreats them to join her on ridiculous activities
such as searching for traces of civilization in the countryside about (the three
discovering all sorts of lost objects, from shoes, cigarette packages, cups,
hats, etc.) and frolicking, a bit like children, in the slightly “befouled,”
but nonetheless Prelapsarian paradise.

When Jules determines to go further in his
encounters with Catherine, with the intention of marrying her, things begin to
take a slightly more serious tone. Although, outwardly, the trio attempts to
remain open about sexuality and to refrain from jealousy and expressions of
sexual dominance, these very issues rear their head in Jules’ disquisition on
Baudelaire’s attitude towards women and in Jim’s passive silences in response;
Catherine reacts, as she will increasingly throughout the tale, with an
impetuous act that runs counter to her two friends’ muted attempts at
self-preservation, by jumping into the Seine. Fortunately, she survives the
act.

Outwardly, then, the film presents itself
as a being about the battle of the sexes in which both men, in thrall to the
feminine, attempt to resist their own temptations to manipulate or control
their “Queen.” Catherine, on her part, refuses to settle into a normative
domestic world, continuing to goad both men with numerous outside affairs and
through her erratic behavior, while still playing upon their own desires for
domesticity and progeny. In the world in which they exist, their sexual
experimentation is destined, alas, to end in tragedy, which, when Jim, finally
exhausted with the flirtatiousness and unpredictability of Catherine’s version
of “love”—l’amour for him as opposed
to Jules’ more stolid and abiding notion of the same emotion Liebe—attempts to leave her, only to be
destroyed by the “Queen Bee” for his attempt to abandon “the hive.”

I had not seen Jules and Jim since I was a youth, and, although, I think I
comprehended much of the above at that time, I also felt removed from the
story, in part because of the inscrutability of the woman, and her lovers’ obsessive
devotion to her. I was, after all, young exclusively gay man, with little
experience with women (as I perhaps am still today) and had, for that reason,
had difficulty with all of Truffaut’s primarily heterosexual fables. If I felt
any sympathy with the characters, it was clearly with Jules, who remained with
Catherine out of faith and filial commitment, as well as demonstrating a strong
sense of responsibility to their daughter, Sabine. He was a tender being, more
interested in insects, ultimately, than in human beings, a loner (described as “a
monk”) who had long ago abandoned his windmill battles at the side of his Quixote
or as a foil for Laurel’s abuse.

This time, however, I realized that Truffaut
was also telling us other tales in his focus on the sexual alliances which
seemed so central to the film’s story. First, the tale of Jules, Jim, and
Catherine, is a story of photography and the cinema itself. Early in the film,
their mutual friend, Albert, shows slides in the manner of La Belle Époque, the
era when the film begins. Soon after, as the figures folic throughout the
landscape, their capers are presented more in the manner of a Charlie Chaplin
film, as they seemingly improvise their silly antics, the film speeding up to
match the frantic movement of the little tramp, along with momentary friezes of
action, reminding us again of the photographic roots of cinema. Soon after,
Truffaut infuses his film with a sense of the scratchy documentary style of
World War I filmic images, presumably many of them stolen from war-time
archives. Jim’s visit to Jules’ and Catherine’s alpine-like chalet in the Black
Forest corresponds with a cinematic rendition of post-war romances in which
loving images of domesticity alternate with interludes of romantic trysts and stylized
representations of longing.

These scenes are followed by Jim’s return
to Paris where the scenes appear to be much more related to the Jacques Prévert-influenced
tales of the underground city, which transform, soon after, to a much more
contemporary (clearly new-wave inspired) street scenes and bar-crawls,
including the comic story-telling of the erotically uncontrollable Thérèse. By
film’s end, Truffaut’s movie takes on images that might remind us more of scenes
from Open City, with Catherine’s,
careening, out-of-control car circling a square (and foretelling the last major
scene of the film) and with a newsreel rendition of the German book-burnings,
particularly the one on May 10, 1933. Jim and Catherine’s mad drive across a
partially demolished bridge certainly suggests the soon-to-be war-time
destruction, and the film’s final scenes clearly represent the post World-War
II realism, as the camera focuses on the burning bodies and burials that would
become common in post-Holocaust imagery.

In short, this movie about obsessive love
is also a film within-a-film about the ways we perceive reality through
photography and celluloid, which helps, of course, to redefine not only the way
we see the world but how we experience the truth.

Just as importantly, moreover, is how this
film applies love as a metaphor for cultural and national distinctions and the
inevitable struggles that result. Love, in other words, stands in for war
throughout this film, and the seemingly vagaries of these figures’ love-lives
can be directly connected to their national distinctions. If Jim and Jules
begin as inseparable friends, like Germany and France, they soon must go to war
with one another. Although they are both terrified of destroying one another,
they both seem active in the battles that destroy everyone else around them.

Jules’ Alpine chalet could not be more
different from Jim’s urban Paris or even from their shared country chateau in
the earlier part of the film (in fact, another interpretation of this film
might just involve just the architectural images presented in Truffaut’s
cinema). This is a film, we must remember, in which most of the action occurs
between the wars, and we must recognize that the prize they both seek,
Catherine, symbolically speaking, is the cause of the great discord documented
throughout the film.

The French-born Catherine, moreover, is
verbally abused by Jules’ German-speaking parents, which leads her to abandon him
almost before the marriage vows have been blessed. And her several marital
affairs must be recognized as her seeking a way out of the idyllically
constricted German life to which she committed herself. If the French have “won”
the first war, the Germans will, at least temporarily, dominate the French in
the brewing Second World War, which is on the horizon by film’s end.

Catherine’s and Jules’ return to Paris may
suggest their personal moral positions, indicating their inabilities to remain
in Germany at the time of such growing discord, but the battle continues, suggested
through their once again rural idyll of a mill-house abode and through
Catherine’s clearly war-like endeavors, which include threats (in the form of
her motorized terrorizing of the square outside his window, a gun with which
she threatens to shoot Jim, and her own threatened suicide). Her final
solution, taking her former lover and herself to their grave with another kind
of dive in the river waters, is merely a reiteration of the violent actions
Jules must now face in France from his own compatriots (Catherine, is after
all, still his wife). If he and his daughter have survived the war of love, he
may not be able to survive the battles of the nationalities ahead.

The search the threesome underwent early
on in the film for traces of civilization, may be harder to perform for Jules
in the spiritually empty landscape that he must now face. Throughout the film,
all the characters read, sharing books and ideas; but after the German
book-burning events, he may find little literature left to help him interpret
the world which lies ahead.